Aesthetics
by blinkblink
Summary: One spring, Hal buys a rocking chair. A few connected domestic scenes. Slash, SnakexOtacon, gratuitous sap.


One spring, Hal buys a rocking chair

Disclaimer: Don't own MGS or the characters. Just as well, really.

One spring, Hal buys a rocking chair. They're driving a Civic at this point, with the cargo capacity of a tin can. He gets one of the build-it-yourself kind from IKEA, the kind that comes in a handy box just the right shape to fit in your trunk, since giving out their address has never been an option, not even to faceless Swedish conglomerates.

He's got it all laid out on the kitchen floor when Snake comes home, the square of peeling linoleum the only clear space in their tiny apartment big enough for all the bits. Being the organizational freak he is, he's divided up all the pieces by size and function; the curved legs and short supports, the tapered back bars, the thick arm rests. Off to his right sit piles of the little pegs which serve the function of nails, along with a bunch of other useless little bits which become required for this kind of thing when you shoot yourself in the foot by deciding not to use good old steel. The instructions, a folded piece of paper with pictures on it like a kid's story book, sits awkwardly on the engineer's lap.

"What the hell is that supposed to be?" says Snake, because the finished product picture is folded up tight against Hal's stomach, and from the collection of wooden bars he could be building himself his own miniature holding cell, for all Snake knows.

"It's a rocking chair," says Hal, glancing up over the rims of his glasses. This is an action Snake has never understood, since he's pretty sure the engineer can't see a damn thing without them. He never does it when he's working, or driving, or with pretty much anything else. But around Snake, he looks over the glasses, or out the side, avoiding the glass. It's just another quirk.

The engineer's holding a long piece of wood curved in a gentle scythe in one hand, and a shorter spoke in the other, trying to fit them together.

Snake ignores the obvious answer that, _no, it's a pile of crap_, and says instead, "are you trying to tell me something, here?"

"Huh?" He doesn't look up this time, instead secures a tiny wooden peg and drives it into a hole with his thumb before jamming the spoke down on top of it.

"'A rocking chair'?" repeats Snake. When that elicits no further response, he clarifies, "they're for old coots, Hal."

"And nursing mothers," says the engineer vaguely, fitting in another spoke with an easy twist.

Snake freezes. "Okay. I'm not sure which thought is more disturbing. There something you're not telling me here?"

Hal rolls his eyes, and puts down the leg he has completed to begin on the other. "No, Snake. They're also good for people with back problems." Having gotten the hang of the useless-wooden-peg system, the engineer breezes through the second leg, and moves on to what seem to be the arm rests. He hasn't glanced at the instructions once. Snake isn't sure whether this is because he's memorized them, or because he figures he's capable of building a chair without a step-by-step walkthrough complete with instructional photos.

"I don't have back problems," says Snake. Which is almost entirely true. Twinges, every now and then, after a mission. After hours of climbing through ventilation shafts or sitting in lockers. Sometimes, spasms. Just a couple of times, really, and hey, who could squat like a pretzel for two and a half hours without experiencing some pain when they had to move to a full-bore sprint immediately after?

"Good for you. Not all of us are so lucky."

"You have back problems?" If he does, the engineer's never mentioned it. But then again, when Hal gets up after sitting at his laptop for hours guiding Snake through whatever facility they're infiltrating that day, it's not like the soldier's around to see him wince. He notes the man's position, sitting cross-legged on the hard floor with his back bent like a bow. "Sitting like that's probably not your best choice, then."

Hal looks up, gray eyes flashing over thin green frames. He gives Snake a "very funny" look. "Well, unless you're going to build it for me, there's not a lot of options." He sets down the completed arm, moves on to the other.

"I'm not putting together anything held together by damn tiny pegs."

"Well, then," says Hal, with a hint of "then let me finish my goddamn project in peace." Snake, sensing that further baiting Hal won't end well, shrugs.

--

The chair, when it's done, takes up an absurd amount of space. Snake figures he could have fit another couch in the chair's place next to the existing couch, although no one would have wanted one there anyway. Hal, to his horror, produces a square pillow from somewhere, the kind grandmas all over the country spend most of their waking hours knitting their grandkids. The chair on its own screams old folks' home. The chair complete with pillow suggests a level of senility Snake isn't sure he can handle. And, to make things worse, the engineer actually _sits_ in it. Snake wonders he can't feel the years falling in on him.

They sit there in the evenings, Snake watching some high-paced, pumped-up adrenaline-pushing movie, or the kind of cheap soft porn they show on the lower cable channels, or sometimes if he can stand it, the news. Hal sits in the chair, laptop on his knees, elbows resting in his lap. He even rocks the damn thing, the balls of his feet planted firmly in the shedding carpet, heels lifting up and down like a boat in a storm. When Snake says something particularly funny, or particularly lewd, he glances over out the side of his glasses as always.

"Why don't you get some contacts?" Snake asks finally one night, during a commercial in Die Hard 3.

"Huh?" says Hal eloquently, glancing over at him, hands pausing over the keyboard. Snake doesn't mind him typing while they watch; for one thing it's his job, and he figures the engineer spends enough time alone in tiny rooms on the computer as it is; for another, he doesn't actually mind the sound. The quiet clicking, and on Hal's laptops it is quiet, has become second nature to him, is no more alarming than the whine of cicadas at night, or the croaking of frogs. It's just background noise.

"That," says Snake, looking sideways at his partner in imitation before turning more to keep from straining his eyes. "If you wore contacts, you wouldn't keep looking around them."

Hal blinks, and then looks back to the screen. "Oh. I didn't think," he says quietly, in the kind of rambling way that means he's not really paying attention to what he's saying. Snake cuts him off, like a semi running over an inch worm.

"I mean, you can't see anything without them. I must just look like a big blur." It doesn't take any effort to keep the accusation out of his voice. To keep from voicing the thought that maybe, that's what you wants to see. Start getting used to it now, so that you won't even think about it later, when the wrinkles start setting in, and the gray hair, and the age spots.

"Contrary to what you seem to think, I'm not actually legally blind, Dave." Hal reaches up and takes off his glasses, setting them down on his laptop's keyboard with a quiet clatter. His face looks longer without them, and sharper, the lines of his bones now uninterrupted. Although his eyes look no different through the lenses or not, without the dark frames surrounding them they seem even lighter, seem silvery against his dark hair. And, without the glasses to focus them, they stare just slightly blankly, not quite able to find their target. Without the glasses, Hal's eyes have the vague far-away look of a genius. Which is not really that surprising. "You're hardly blurry," he says defensively.

Snake is sitting about seven feet away from the engineer, so this is not much of an achievement, but when the engineer's eyes narrow at his smirk he boosts his assessment. Slightly.

"So you're saying, you don't need contacts because anything you need to see out of your peripheral vision, it'll be seven feet or closer?"

"I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't use my peripheral vision a lot."

Snake has noticed. It makes him nervous in the car. And on missions. But everything about Hal on missions makes him nervous.

"And yet," he says, making a sideways motion, unwilling to let the topic drop now that he's brought it up.

"It's just easier than turning my head, okay?" Hal puts his glasses back on.

"Right," says Snake, long and sarcastic, because just this minute he's okay with pissing Hal off. He can get by without the microwave for a while. "All that rocking sucking up your capacity for lying?"

Hal narrows his eyes, and it would take a blind man not to see the storm coming. "You tell me why you hate the chair so much, and I'll tell you why."

"Because it's a goddamn eyesore," answers Snake immediately, grates a little irritation into his tone to flavour the sincerity.

"You think everything I own is an eyesore. But you don't make this kind of fuss over anything else."

"Well, I've gotten used to the rest of your crap. It takes time to blur the edges out into the background."

"You're sitting on a couch upholstered in orange and brown tweed. And you sat on it the first day we got it; I remember."

"Nothing wrong with orange and brown tweed, in moderation." Snake has extensive training and experience in lying through his teeth. Unfortunately, by now Hal has almost equally extensive training in seeing straight through it. Also, – with his glasses – he is not blind.

On the TV, Die Hard 3 returns, broadcasting to a non-existent audience.

"It looks like puke, Dave. You said so yourself." Hal leans forward, chair tipping with him so that his bare feet are braced flat on the carpet. "This isn't about aesthetics, is it?"

"You don't think maybe I have a hard time sleeping with a man who spends his evenings in a rocking chair? What's next, sock darning?" He regrets it the minute he says it, has committed a possibly unrecoverable tactical error, the conversational equivalent of painting a giant red target on his back.

Hal rocks backwards and forwards once, thoughtfully. Which means he's worried about stepping on Snake's toes. That in and of itself is enough to make Snake set his teeth. "Considering you haven't shown any marked drop in efforts to get into my pants; no, I don't." He pauses, gives his head a thoughtless tilt which adds even further to his usual sincerity. Hal can't lie worth a damn, but he makes up for it with the sheer molten truth he can pour into statements, more than enough to shatter doubts. This is a helpful trait when you are trying to convince the UN to give you buckets of money and okay you as an NGO, but less helpful when your landlord asks for your occupation. "Do you?" Hal doesn't have to reverse the pronouns; Snake can spot the heart of a conversation when he sees it, especially when he was aware of it long before the conversation began.

Snake shrugs, lithe and light-hearted, eyes icy. "You tell me."

Hal sighs, a tightening in his joints and flicker of his eyes betraying his movement before he makes it. The chair seesaws as he leaves it, gliding back and forth twice before slowing to a stop, laptop now its only passenger. By then Hal has sat down next to him, couch creaking arthritically under his weight. "I would stay with you, even if you started sitting on floral-upholstered love seats." He reaches out a long hand, rests it on Snake's chest above his slowly beating heart, the soft heat of it transferring almost instantly through his thin shirt. "It's this I care about, not this." Hal's hand is smooth against the side of his face, confident as it combs back through his thick crop of hair. The roots tingle as the engineer's fingertips rake through them.

Snake reaches back and pins Hal's hand against the back of his neck, their eyes locked together. Hal shifts his fingers to splay wide over Snake's nape, thumb and forefinger sliding up over the base of his skull, middle finger resting solidly over the prominent C7 vertebrae, two smaller fingers curving downwards to lie against his spine. A wordless assertion: _you trust me_.

"I'll get rid of it, if you want," Hal whispers, low and diplomatic, without reference to Snake's unusually personal dislike. Even after years of it, living with someone who makes concessions so easily is still staggering, and a lifetime of soldiering keeps Snake guessing at ulterior motives. The fact that there have never been any up until now doesn't mean there won't be this time; Hal isn't above laying traps for him, although the verbal arena isn't one either of them has ever been comfortable with for fighting out their squabbles. Hit-and-run appliance sabotage and coffee molestation have been the staple attacks of all but their most serious disagreements.

"Really?" he drawls after a moment, reaching out to trace a hand over Hal's shoulder, curving around the line of his shoulder blade and trailing further down along the smooth valley of his spine. "And who'll you be complaining to about your back?"

"You," replies Hal immediately, deadpan, eyes on Snake's lips now, back tautening like a sail under wind. His tongue flits along the thin line of his lips, leaving a train of shining dampness in the flickering light of the television. It's hypnotising as a spinning quarter on a string, drawing Snake's own eyes. There's a split-second pause, the tense muscle-locked silence between claps of thunder, and then on-screen a gun bursts into fire. It might have been the bang of a starting gun; they both move in time, magnets pulling each other together when dropped. His mouth against Hal's, Hal's fingers through his hair, the warm press of bodies on harsh and hideous tweed.

"Keep the damned thing, then," he hisses in Hal's ear when he has had his fill of the engineer's lips, savouring the shiver his words provoke. Hal makes a throaty noise, whether of assent or pleasure or impatience he can't tell, and a moment later the thought is lost in any case.

The matter of the glasses slips his mind completely.

--

The chair, Snake is loath to admit, is actually comfortable. More disturbing, the rocking motion is addictive. Once he allows himself to begin the slow tilting, he can't seem to stop, feet tapping to an inaudible tune.

He sits in it in the early hours, sometime between three thirty and four, and watches Hal sleep. The engineer's narrow form is stretched out on the couch, limp and boneless. In the darkness he looks more like a pile of clothes than a man, one bare arm hidden under his neck, the other wrapped close under a thin cotton blanket, the long tendrils of his dark hair swept over his skin in the soft strokes of a wide brush. Hal sighs in his sleep occasionally, a hollow sound like wind passing through an empty room, but he is otherwise quiet. Even in his nightmares he is surprisingly silent; Snake has seen him cry soundlessly, in a startling difference from his waking sorrow. It's a tendency that has made his few sleeping screams almost heart-stopping.

Snake rearranges the pillow against the small of his back, hating himself for using it at all, and considers a smoke. He decides against it with a grimace; there is something about abandoning your bed because cockroaches have been nesting in it which makes people unlikely to sleep deeply, and he highly doubts Hal is any exception.

He wonders vaguely, as he tips the chair back and forth with thoughtless ankles, where Hal dug up the idea to purchase this monstrosity. Wonders whether the engineer has given up anime to peruse online furniture catalogues in his spare time. It's not an entirely unpleasant thought, until it occurs to him this would mean a sudden dense proliferation of footstools, end tables, hearthrugs and other cluttering and useless affectations. Hal's shows are annoying and have the potential to induce seizures, but they are at least restricted to his laptop, which is a strictly enforced no-go zone for the soldier.

Snake's not sure whether it's the chair's motion, or the easy action of rocking it, but it is against all logic soothing. Like stroking a cat, or brushing out a sleepy husky's fur. A calm rise and fall, requiring just enough coordination to keep him anchored while allowing the strong, heavily used muscles of his back to loosen against the pillowed frame. Hal has unsurprisingly built it well; there is no creaking, no sound at all as the curved feet roll back and forth over the musty carpet, and no hint of unevenness or weakness in its build.

It's close to four when Hal starts himself awake, surfacing from some dream, or maybe just some joint complaining at his unusual position until the pain sinks in deep enough to rouse him. The motion pulls Snake out of the dull stupor he's fallen into, a sort of half-sleep the smooth rocking has lulled him into. He looks over at Hal without actually moving, partially to keep from startling the engineer with the movement, partially because his body is warm and heavy and nestled comfortably into the chair's curved embrace.

Hal blinks heavily, the soft light from their battered old VCR/DVD player's clock glinting green off his eyes. His glasses are sitting somewhere around the foot of the couch, presumably tucked in where they won't be stepped on. There's a soft rustle as he turns onto his back, blanket wrapping tight around his chest, a blue cotton cocoon.

"Dave?" he mumbles, and Snake wonders if he can see him at all, or if he's just addressing the darkness, assuming his partner is lurking somewhere in the shadows.

"Hmm," he answers, just a soft rumble in his throat.

"'S going on?" Sleep is wrapped thick and heavy around Hal's voice, slurring his words and muffling his tone. It's a familiar tone, one the soldier expects to start hearing around the 30 hour mark of Hal's insomniac crusades, fitting in somewhere between _time to start taping conversations if you need proof of their happening _and _remove sharp objects from the vicinity_.

"Bed's infested. Go back to sleep."

"Infest- wraugh," the engineer switches tracks straight from tired to disgusted as memory flips its prompt cards, tone a weak echo of the horrified one from earlier that evening. After a moment of silent contemplation, Hal rolls off the couch, or at least tries to, blanket trapping his legs tight against each other and causing him to fall to his knees. He curses vaguely and breaks free of his soft-sided cocoon, flinging the abandoned husk back onto the couch as he pads off in the direction of the bathroom. Snake rocks absently in the dark and considers stealing his place.

The engineer stumbles back through the dark a few minutes later, light switch on the other side of the apartment, and cautiously eases his way back onto the couch, re-establishing himself with a soft rustle of cotton and the creaking of springs.

"I thought you'd have stolen my place by now," he says quietly, staring at the ceiling as far as Snake can tell.

"I thought about it."

"Finally managing to fit the chair into your world vision?"

"… not necessarily." Sometimes, Snake misses the good old days, before Hal learned to recognise the sound of Snake lying through his teeth. He's not sure whether it's to his credit or not that it's not very often.

"I like to look at you," says Hal quietly, apropos of nothing, knocking the soldier out of his own thoughts. It's such a non sequitur that Snake turns to look at him more fully, wonders if the engineer fell asleep for a moment and woke up in a different conversation. "And I just … want to see you as clearly as possible. Because, you know, no one else ever really does. Just flashes, on cameras or around corners or before you tranq 'em and god knows what they remember after that." He does not, Snake notes, list _before you kill them_, but that isn't surprising. The soldier says nothing, waiting for this conversation to reappear on the map. "I mean, I know it's not like an eighth of an inch of plastic's going to distort anything; hell, I can see you better with them most of the time. But everyone's always watching you through a screen, or a scope, or as a little dot on their radar, and I don't want to be one of them. Not when you're here. Not when you're not out there, being Snake."

There's a long pause as Snake takes this in, the tiny ever-present soldier division of his mind shaking its head in despair while the rest tries to make sense of an idea which could never have occurred to him. There's a longer pause while Snake tries to conceive of a response, and categorises the fact that he can think of a sarcastic reply to any conceivable situation but is stymied by one heart-felt response. But, like most everything else about his partner's conversation skills, Hal knows this too. They're two sides of a coin, truth and lies, and while they can fool outsiders they see straight through one another. Snake sighs quietly, through his smile.

"Does this mean we get to trade places?"

There's a quiet snort and the shuffling of fabric as Hal turns. "No, Dave, it doesn't. But you can try your luck flipping for it tomorrow."

"How 'bout we arm wrestle instead?"

Hal really does laugh this time, breaking the silence, the suggestion, and the mood. The soldier relaxes back into his chair with Hal's warm tones in his ear. "G'night."

"Good night."

--

The chair gets left behind at their next move. They've never had space for something too big to fit in the trunk, but even if they might have considered taking it, the circumstances simply don't allow. Their cover has melted to a particle-thin layer of protection with almost no warning, and they are out of the apartment within 20 minutes of Snake's sharp order to pack up. Out of the city within an hour.

The new apartment has a balcony, which is too risky to use, and water damage. Snake long ago stopped seeing the positive sides, if any, to the hovels they rent. They've procured the usual cheap furniture within two days of arrival, spent the obligatory afternoon shuffling it into position, accompanied by much cursing and alcohol consumption. And, finally, they lie late at night in a frameless bed which Hal insists is not precisely square with the wall but at least has nothing other than them in it, toes aching and backs sore.

Hal is lying still, spread long and awkward on the uneven mattress, but his breathing has the audible catch that suggests wakefulness. Snake shifts, back twitching just slightly, and rocks his shoulders to readjust his position.

"Hal?"

"Mn?" The higher plains of Hal's face are picked out by the soft street-light streaming in through the blind-less windows. He blinks heavily, and then turns slightly to glance at Snake out of the corner of his eye.

"D'you think they have an IKEA here?"


End file.
